Wallace Stevens reads his poem, 1 minute on YouTube.
The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin
JFK Speech on Religion and Politics
The Apples
This is a flash fiction piece by me. For more information on the flash fiction approach, click the link above.
Here we have a man on his front porch, sitting and watching the traffic, the sunset ochre in the haze of an Indian Summer afternoon. He holds a pair of clippers that belonged to his father. A beautiful day, warm enough to drive the sparrows to the birdbath in the morning and under the hedges by lunch. He drove into town and drank iced tea in the colonnade, wetting his fingers in the condensation on the glass, to turn the pages of the latest Time.
His father left him all his tools: channel-locks and hammers, socket sets, files and screwdrivers, power drills, tree saws, sewer snakes, leaf rakes and boxes of nails. Everything a man might need. Now he holds the shears, working them on the cooling air, as on the thinnest branches of his trees. And wonders how he came to own one pair of black shoes for everyday, and one black pair for Sunday. And somewhere in a closet are a pair for hiking, which he never does.
Time goes slowly in the afternoon, then suddenly the day is gone. It doesn’t linger at the door, with promises to visit soon or call about the holidays. You do not hear its tires wheezing down the driveway and pausing at the street. So when he puts the clippers away in the dim garage, and hangs his picking ladder on the wall beside his truck, the sun is gone.
It’s time to eat, but nothing sounds good. Nothing in the cupboard but boredom. The day was just too wonderful; who can think about food? Well, maybe a salad. Spinach tossed with olives and balsamic vinaigrette. Or these Gala apples, just picked and washed and drying on a towel. He takes an apple, polishes its surface on his shirt, and goes out.
There is just a last lip of purple light beyond the stand of sycamores, and then the town and the slow canal. He closes his eyes and listens as a semi shifts down and makes for the hill beyond the tired, dusty trees. He takes a bite and sighs. So many memories in apples.
Like the time they drove to a farm in the mountains, where the fruit was just an hour off the tree. He rode in the back of the pickup with his brother and the crates of apples, and he can still see his own hand reaching out for one that ran like watermelon down his chin. His mother made pies.
He remembers the apples were red, not green, but gave him a stomach ache and later made him dream he’d lost his dog; that he found the front door open and running saw her wagging her tail and running down the steps; that his family stood in the yard frowning into the distance and could not help; that running in that hopeless, sodden way of dreams he saw her turn that corner that he knew was grief, pause to around look for him, and disappear.
So many memories in apples.
The Apples by Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 Unported License.
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 Unported License.
The Gap Between Good Taste and Good Writing
The First Tulip
I took some photos of a tulip just blooming in my parents' back yard.
Spring is early, because winter never showed up in Santa Barbara.
Link: http://goo.gl/3zJY0.
Dog Napping
Last night I shared a poem I dug out of a notebook and reworked. It needed a little more polish tonight.
What The Dog Owns is online now in PDF, with a fitting illustration.
Please share the link with others, if you like. Here's another version, for copy/paste:
500,000 readers
If you’re a blogger and you wish you had a broader audience, you’re goofy if you don’t get on Google Plus.
I don’t really have 500,000 readers, that’s an inside joke. But I have over 2300, and I have 500 more than I did a week ago. It’s accelerating.
I’m connected with a few people – well-known people, who were well known before Facebook or G+ – who really do have over 500,000. They’ll hit a million readers pretty soon. So when they share something from me with their circles … boom. We’re networking.
Here’s a little video with some basics. It’s 8 months old, so there have been improvements.
What the Dog Owns
It’s good sometimes to go back through the old folders of incomplete and abandoned writing and try to polish something up. It might unlatch a window.
The Moment
They say that we should be
in the moment, cherish and be
present entirely, the moment
being all we have.
And the future, the infinite
possibility, vast and strange
un-writtenness of it, dark swirling
Maybe of it, belongs to God.
But the past, with its happy smells
bright fuzzy motion, sudden pains
and great meals, long sleepy
afternoons, belongs completely
to the dog.
Kyle Kimberlin
Wednesday, May 18, 2005, 1:37:26 PM
Thursday, February 23, 2012 12:10 AM
The Moment by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
They Buy Why You Do It
Watch this brilliant 18 minute TED presentation by Simon Sinek.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
I found it very inspirational. It’s a simple concept, but somehow shifts the way I think about myself in terms of self-promotion on many levels.
Props: The Gnomies mastermind group and Jerry Hobby.
New LibreOffice
The Document Foundation has made the latest version of its LibreOffice free office suite available for download. Improvements have been made. Here’s the news: http://goo.gl/vSh7z.
Those who have followed my perennial thread on the virtues of free open source alternatives to expensive, proprietary software know that this is good news.
I downloaded and installed it over the weekend and it works just great. There are still features needed before LibreOffice is ready to take the throne from its big brother, but even now it’s a worthy heir apparent.
http://www.libreoffice.org/
The Key to Windows
If you are like a lot of people, there are keys on your keyboard that you never use. What are PrtScr, SysRq, and ^? Well, I could tell you but the I’d have to Esc you, so let’s save those for later and deal with the Windows Key today.
The Windows Key lives on the lower left part of your keyboard, next to Alt and pretty close to Z. 
What does it do? Press it and see. Go ahead, it won’t hurt anything. Press it, watch what happens, then press it again to reverse the event.
The windows key does the same thing as clicking the Start button with your mouse. It opens the Start menu, so you can see your main menu, programs, etc.
Pressing the key a second time simply makes the menu go away.
This is useful because you can access a vital function of your PC with a press of a button. You’re not confined to using the mouse. And in Windows 7 your Search programs and files function is the first thing on the bottom of the menu. 
I’ll admit that I didn’t use the Windows Key for years. But now, and for a long time now, I do it without even thinking. That little Search element is my constant friend. I use it to quickly find documents and folders, and I use the larger Start menu to open programs, access photos and videos, navigate to My Computer, My Dropbox, etc.
Get to know your Windows Key. It will come in handy, you’ll see.
Something Unspeakable This Way Comes
I read an excellent article on the transition to eBooks, and the resistance to it; what we gain and what we give up.
I like my Kindle. I think the only thing I miss so far is something sentimental, not organic like the heft of the object or the smell or feel of the paper. Many of the hundreds of books in this room were gifts from people I love, and those objects have special meaning beyond the words within the covers.
I’ve always enjoyed giving and receiving books as gifts. And I genuinely enjoy getting gifts cards for Christmas, Amazon being my favorite. However, if you give me an eBook on that day, I’ll probably arrange for the family pets to do something unspeakable in your stocking. “Hung by the chimney with care” should mean high security, is my point.
I’m kidding. I think eBooks will become good gifts, though so far I haven’t seen an easy way to do that, except the gift card. Which works: I got my Kindle and some downloads with a Christmas gift card.
Is all of this adding up to “it’s the thought that counts?” Let’s think about that.
The article is worth your 5 minutes, in my opinion. Here’s a link:
E-books Can’t Burn by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
Special addendum just for my blog readers (not on G+).
The title of this blog post is mindful of Something Wicked This Way Comes, a novel by Ray Bradbury, who is vehemently opposed to digital books. He told Yahoo to go to hell. Which is pretty funny.
Mr. Bradbury thinks we need less government, but the government should be vastly enlarged enough to put a base on the moon and shoot rockets at Mars so we can live forever. The irony of this fiction is that the only way Mr. Bradbury will live much longer (he’s 92) is through his writing. His books will certainly decompose if left to rot in paperback. I don’t think there’s a writer alive today who can count on being in print in perpetuity.
Metaphor 